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Monday, August 31, 2015

Finland/Iceland trip diary - day 9

Compared to the lush, varied views as you fly in and out of
Finland, it doesn’t take long for the stereotype of Iceland to assert itself
from the sky – vast expanses of grey, with not a tree in sight. The cab ride
from the airport reinforces the same impression – you can see some interesting
terrain in the distance, but the immediate view is just flatness, punctuated by
the occasional warehouse. We’re staying at the 101 Hotel, a boutique hotel
(“member of Design Hotels”) which Ally read about in the New York Times. It doesn’t take long to realize how expensive
Iceland is, even compared to Scandinavia. The cab ride came to something like
$160 (even with the 10% discount for cash – hey, nice gesture!) and the hotel
room is far more expensive than we would really have gone for, even given our
lackadaisical approach. But what can I say, neither of us had checked properly. You can
see the attention to design in the room, but it’s not always for the best – I
nearly walked into the bathroom mirror several times. Also, it has the least
stable wi-fi of any of our hotels so far, and it’s also the noisiest location,
with Ally having been bothered at various points in the night by music from an
adjacent nightclub, by voices, by traffic and by what sounded like horses. Of
course, design can’t fix that, but maybe better sound-proofing would have
helped a bit.

Oh well, you can’t win them all. The hotel is on a very
plain-looking street, but Laugavegur, the main shopping thoroughfare, is one block
up. It goes a long way in both directions, crammed with distractions. We
arbitrarily chose a place to eat called Café Paris, although unlike the places I
mentioned in Helsinki, this makes no actual attempt to evoke Paris. We split a
cheeseburger and a Caesar salad, just for a change I guess, and walked a bit
more afterwards. The next morning we covered some of that area again, along with a
brief walk through the old part of Reykjavik, and then headed down to the waterfront,
where the main eye-catcher, excepting the mountains in the background, is a newish, lonely-seeming
concert/conference centre. There are more signs of construction around town than you might
expect – perhaps reflecting the country’s recovery from its financial crisis.

We seldom rent a car on our trips – I think the last time
was in Australia a dozen years ago – but it seemed like a necessary step this
time. A guy from the rental company brought it, a little blue Hyundai, to the
hotel at noon. We're spending the next three nights in the Ion Adventure
Hotel, which is actually only an hour or so from Reykjavik, but ought to open
up a whole different world (it’s
just 18km from Thingvellir National Park, sometimes regarded as the country’s
most important - although also the most touristy). The directions sound
impenetrable on Google Maps, but actually only amount to taking the correct route
out of the city, and then not missing a particular left turn along the way. Of
course, we missed the left turn (well, I was navigating, so it was just me) and
had to double back.

After that point we hardly saw any other vehicles until we
reached the hotel, and you quickly start to realize how you could bury deeper
and deeper into Iceland, to all intents and purposes limitlessly, reorienting
your entire sense of proportion and scale (we did briefly consider, during our
planning, whether to do a more extended driving tour, which I guess
is one of the iconic ways to spend time here, but we concluded it wouldn’t
really suit us). For most of the way, the road ran alongside a big pipe, and we
eventually came to the geothermal power plant from which it emanates – we stopped
at a lookout, and spotted the hotel a few kilometres away, so that was easy. It
might not immediately sound too appealing to say that the hotel, nestled against
a mountain on one side, faces a power plant on the other, but in this case it
really only means a soothing background of pristine white steam clouds. Also
not far in the distance is Lake Thingvallavatn,
which is Iceland’s largest. The hotel is a base for helicopter tours among much else (the helicopter below is safely taking off, and not coming down in a disastrous whirl of smoke, as you might momentarily think).

Soon after checking in, we went out and randomly followed a
trail up the mountain. We ended up walking a loop of 9km or so, much of the
first half above the power plant, which has an aesthetically quite pleasing
geometric tidiness to it. After that we wandered through a craggy area of
boiling pools (signs warning of scalding temperatures) and warm
streams, and then descended down between the lava fissures, giving us a feeling
(albeit highly illusory) of isolated adventurism. We climbed out and walked back,
mostly through a big meadow (causing outrage among more displaced creatures, this time
sheep). And that was a very satisfying initial walk in what I guess is the real
Iceland.

I only emphasize that point because up to then, Iceland was
seeming rather artificial. The 101 Hotel was a mistake – even if we’d liked it,
it would only have buried us in a little self-contained design bubble which
doesn’t help to integrate you into a place. The Ion Adventure Hotel is actually
its cousin in the “Design Hotels” pantheon (it's on the very next page of the global
“Design Hotels” book they both proudly display in the lobby) but everything
about it is more rational and pleasing (even our room’s bizarre floor to
ceiling photograph of a horse’s eye doesn’t seem too grating). There’s nothing
you can do about the prices though. We had lunch here after we arrived, and
there’s basically no point even contemplating what it ran to (the modest chocolate bar
in our minibar costs $18). This kind of price-inflation environment isn’t alien
to us – we met in Bermuda for Pete’s sake! – but in Reykjavik it wasn’t really
clear that the trip would deliver the kind of memories and satisfaction to
make it worthwhile. But now it seems that it will, so we can just stop focusing
on it (well, more or less)…